Latest News

19th closure
16th Sep

Thursday 19th September from 1.00pm: Half-Day Practice Closure for Protected Learning Time

All Carn to Coast Health Centres sites will be undertaking protected learning time from 1pm on Thursday 19th September and so will be closed, reopening the following day as usual.  This closure will include the dispensary at Homecroft.

If you feel you have an urgent care need during the closure afternoon, please telephone the usual surgery number. There will be an emergency service, with clinicians on hand to prioritise patients who urgently need to be seen.

The closure is to facilitate essential staff training and development activities and has been authorised by the Integrated Care Board. Thank you for your ongoing support whilst we aim to improve our services.

Collective action
6th Aug

Collective Action not Industrial Action - GPs are on your side

You may be seeing news reports talking about “industrial action” by GPs and we wished to update our patients.
 
The British Medical Association (BMA - the registered trade union for doctors) recently undertook a ballot of all GPs who hold a contract to provide GP services to patients - the vast majority of GP practices are independent partnerships holding an NHS contract. The ballot asked if GP partners were prepared to participate in joint (“collective”) action with the BMA. An overwhelming majority across Cornwall and the UK said yes, including Carn to Coast Health Centres.
 
This is NOT about pay but about General Practice receiving the amount of funding needed to employ enough doctors, nurses and other staff to provide sufficient appointments and for our staff to work safely.
 
As GPs, we have for years been doing work that is not funded and not contracted due to gaps in commissioned services and pressures in secondary care services; we have been doing so out of concern for our patients and to ensure that you continue to receive the care you deserve. However, with chronic underfunding and increased demand it is no longer sustainable for us to continue working in this way.
 
 
Across the country, since 2015, we have seen 1600 Practices close or merge, there are 6 million more registered patients and 2000 fewer full time equivalent GPs. Our funding levels are significantly lower than 2018 levels.
 
The joint action across the country is hoping to force the government to look at General Practice and urgently reconsider the amount of funding it receives. You may remember seeing our post a few weeks back sharing that we get 30p per patient per day to provide services – this is woefully inadequate.Though you may have heard this referred to in the press as industrial action; this is factually incorrect.
 
 
This is not industrial action. We are not on strike. This is “collective action” which is about working legitimately within our contracts. We will not be doing anything that compromises your safety, and we will not currently be going on strike. But we are fighting to be able to provide better services to you.
 
Please continue to use our services as normal and rest assured that patient care is still our priority.
 
We hope you understand that we are taking this action to ensure that general practice locally, in Cornwall and across England is there for our patients in years to come.
 
appointment
21st Mar

Appointment System Update

We are changing how we manage our appointments system in order to try to cut waiting times for certain types of appointment.  You can read full information about this decision and the reasons behind it here

When you contact us for an appointment, or a clinician feels they need to see or speak to you following a test result or hospital appointment, one of two things will happen:

  1. If an appointment is available in the next two weeks, we’ll contact you to book it there and then.  We will not book further ahead at this point (*see below for exceptions). 
  1. If not, we will send you a text (or email or letter) to advise that we know you need a face-to-face or telephone appointment and that we will be in touch soon. We hope this will assure patients that they are not forgotten and that, when we are in touch, we can offer an appointment within a two-three week period as these become available.  Additionally, we hope this will result in reduced duplication and appointments going to waste, reducing the number of patients who do not attend (‘DNA’) appointments.  Rest assured that, if the appointments available do not work for the patient, they will remain at the top of the list for booking according to their availability. (It really helps us when patients use the option in Klinik to advise times they would not be available for an appointment).

*Our urgent on-the-day clinician appointments and our routine nursing appointment processes remain unchanged, as do some of our planned procedure clinics, such as minor surgery or contraceptive services, which will be booked up to six weeks in advance.

By reducing duplicated and DNA appointments, we can bring waiting times down for all our patients – this is our primary aim

We continue to lobby locally and nationally for better funding for practices such as ours, which national evidence confirms have higher workloads than the average practice.  Increased funding would provide more clinicians to offer additional capacity to see and treat patients. 

We hope this update is helpful.  Please do go to the link above for a fuller explanation should you have any queries.

Virus
12th Mar

NOROVIRUS

Cases of sickness and diarrhoea (norovirus) are rising and impacting local hospitals.

  • If you or your family have symptoms, please do not visit a healthcare setting.
  • Get better at home with simple self-care.
  • Stay off school or work until you have not been sick or had diarrhoea for at least 2 days. This is when you are most infectious.

Self-care tips:

  • stay at home and get plenty of rest
  • drink lots of fluids
  • take paracetamol if you're in discomfort
  • wash your hands with soap and water often (hand gel is not effective against norovirus)

 

online services
11th Mar

Online visibility

We understand that some of our patients may have been unable to view certain documents (e.g. letters from the hospital) when using online services due to a software problem. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused. We are pleased to inform you that this issue has been resolved; any new documents added to your electronic GP health records will be visible and it may take up to a month for older, affected documents to become visible.  

Your GP team will have been able to access the letters, so your care will not have been affected during this time. 

8th Mar

Getting the Best out of Klinik - helping us help you

 With helpful input from our Patient Participation Group, we hope the below information helps patients with our online Klinik system.

H

How Important?

If you have more than one issue as a new health problem, pick the issue that is bothering you most (but remember the other options available on Klinik for additional enquiries about issues such as referral queries, sick notes etc).

A

Accurate

Double check your personal information – a wrong date of birth, telephone number or address will mean things can be delayed while we check that your Klinik form is attached to the correct set of notes.

D

Detail

Provide as much detail as you can.  There is always a free-text box on every chosen option at some point, so you can add extra information there if the options that come up don’t quite ‘fit’.

The more information we have at the outset the better chance we have of making the right initial assessment first time. In the best case we may be able to provide a treatment based on the Klinik form without you needing to take further time to visit the surgery. If we do not have enough information we may contact you requesting that you provide more details, sometimes via a further Klinik form as it again enables the system to assign the right priority to the new information you supply.

F

Factual

Be factual as well as telling us your concerns and worries.  For instance, giving us any health monitoring readings, dates of health related symptoms etc, can be really helpful to our clinicians.

A

Access

Give us information on your access needs if you are likely to need to come in to be seen.   If you cannot access all of our sites or accept all contact methods please make sure this information is included.

C

Choice

There are lots of options to choose from on Klinik – please take a moment to look at them and pick what fits your issue.  Many of them are simple request options which only require completion of one free text box. 

T

Timeframe

For new/follow-up issues, include how long your symptoms/concerns have been present and whether they are getting worse, getting better or staying the same as this really helps us prioritise.

S

Specific

Be specific with what your concerns are and what you would like to happen. There is a section at the end for this for new health problems/follow-up issues. We cannot promise that we will always provide the type of contact for which you are asking, but we will try.

Now we’ve shared what we hope have been some helpful tips for you, can you help us by avoiding the following pitfalls?

PLEASE DON’T … 

S

Same Information in multiple boxes

Copying the same information into every answer actually does not help you or us – it does not provide additional detail we need and makes it hard for clinicians to pick out the important information.

O

Omit important information

Please don’t leave out any information that you think is important. The more information we have the better chance we have of making the right decision first time which is what we aim to do.

B

Be Unkind

We understand that patients get frustrated but insulting people who already work in an extremely demanding and often stressful environment will not help anyone and will likely lead to clinicians and staff leaving, creating longer waits for patients.

staff
29th Nov 2022

Clinical Staffing Update and Access for Patients

Staffing

We are continuing to strive to recruit more GPs and advanced practitioners to provide care for our patients.  Clearly we would wish these clinicians to work in the practice to provide increased face-to-face appointments and quicker access to follow-up care.  We will continue to endeavour to recruit for this purpose.  We are, however, able to recruit some GPs and practitioners from outside our area to work remotely.  We are pleased to say there will be some new names joining the team in the coming weeks, handling patient needs which can be managed over the telephone (such as non urgent issues and ongoing chronic disease reviews) meaning our existing local clinicians are able to focus on providing face-to-face appointments.

Activity

We are continuing to experience high levels of demand for services and we know many patients are reporting concerns about getting through to our teams and accessing services they need.  We want to assure our patients are teams are working exceptionally hard and we are sorry we cannot offer appointments as quickly as our patients may wish. 

 To reassure our patients that the team are working exceptionally hard, in the month of October 2022 we have:

  •  Received and responded to 7276 issues raised through our Klinik system alone, the top three reasons being:
    • 3500 from patients with a new health problem
    • 1750 from patients requiring follow-up care around an existing health problem
    • 650 patients needing nurse appointments
  • Consulted with over 7200 patients
  • Issued via prescription over 62,700 different medications to patients

Access for non-urgent issues

Our teams are working overtime and staying late wherever possible but we are anxious to protect them from overwork and potentially becoming unwell.  We ask our patients to contact us between 0800-1300 or 1400-1700 for their usual care and requests for on-the-day consultations for acute illnesses.  Both our telephone lines and our online consultation service (Klinik) will be open for this purpose during these times.

 

Between 1300-1400 and after 1700 only issues of an urgent nature can be handled.  Our online system will be closed during these times and our telephone message will advise patients with a non-urgent issue to call back. 

 

klinik
18th Nov 2022

Klinik - Online Triage- More options for easier access

Over 75% of patients use Klinik to for their new health problem, sick note requests or to cancel an appointment already and options include:

  • Follow up/concern about existing health problems
  • Long-term (chronic disease) condition review request
  • Referral queries
  • Nurse enquiries
  • Test results
  • Medication queries
  • Submit your health readings & measurements option
  • General enquiries/update your details
  • Insurance and other reports/private letters queries
  • Self-care options

All patients with access to the internet or a smartphone/device are being asked to use this system, leaving our phone lines for those who cannot.   Please do click here to read our original briefing from last November which explains more about why we implemented Klinik and its benefits to our patients.

Camera
18th Nov 2022

Guidance on Sending Photos/Images

Sending photos

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are now doing much more of our work through telephone consultations. Sometimes it is useful for the nurse or doctor to see a picture, or you may feel it will help them understand your problem. This is particularly the case with skin lesions or rashes. To help us and you we will no longer be accepting photos through our email address. All photos will have to be sent through a text message reply. Any photos sent via email will be returned unopened and you will be directed to send them via our text service.

Sometimes you may have a skin problem in an intimate area such as on breasts, genitalia (vagina & penis), or the anus (back passage). In this case please arrange a telephone consultation first. The nurse or doctor will then decide if they need a visual image and arrange this either through a face to face appointment, photos via video consultation. Please DO NOT send intimate photos without talking to a nurse or doctor first.

If your child has a rash in an intimate area we will usually arrange for a face to face consultation if we need to see the rash. DO NOT take photos of your child’s genitalia or anus and send them to us, this will leave you open to prosecution for making indecent images of a child. 

How to take a high-quality clinical image

  1. ​​Ideally, ask someone else to take the photo.
  2. Use a plain background.
  3. Ensure good overhead lighting.
  4. Take a wider image to establish location and then a close up of the lesion or rash. Different angles can help demonstrate size/shape of a lesion.
  5. Ensure the images are in focus.
bladder
18th Nov 2022

Urine specimens

According to the latest evidence we can treat most urine infections based on symptoms alone. We therefore now only accept urine samples when a clinician (doctor, nurse, paramedic) has explicitly asked you to bring one in or when we have written to you to ask for a repeat sample. 

If you feel you have a urine or water infection please complete an online consultation here or call if you do not have internet access. If you call, our telephone hub team will ask you some simple questions and may be able to direct you to your pharmacist for quick treatment if required. Your pharmacist can prescribe antibiotics for a simple urine infection. These can be supplied free of charge if you do not normally pay for your prescriptions. 

covid vac
18th Nov 2022

Recording your COVID vaccination status if vaccinated abroad

We have had a number of queries from patients who have had their Covid vaccinations overseas and until now have been unable to show them on the NHS App "Covid Pass"
It is now possible to have these recorded to show on the App. This is administered by the vaccine centres and the 119 service and NOT by GPs.
If this affects you or anyone you know please click here
 
 
 
 
 
nhs
18th Nov 2022

Expanding our Workforce

Please take a look at the below videos that explain more -

Extended Healthcare

Clinical Pharmacist

Social Prescriber